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basically true, because it looks demolished. She’d locked herself into the apartment, had the chain up. She shut herself in the bathroom. God knows how long. The cat was starving. I don’t know when she feeds the cat. The cat looks like it has anorexia. No, I couldn’t get in, and she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom, so what was I supposed to do? The television was turned up so that I could hear the news anchor in my own bathroom. I asked her repeatedly to let me in, I was firm but I didn’t
engage,
and I could tell she’d been at it, you know? A certain way she sounds. Too flexible. You know pretty much as soon as you hear her.”
    When he is not driving, he loves to be driven. He loves to see the lights, the skyline, the traffic shimmering above the water. In his own country, you get to know people in traffic jams. You learn their children’s names, their grandchildren’s names. You talk politics. You are with these people for a long time. You have a fistfight, and then later you invite your combatant to dine with you, should you ever emerge from the traffic. Once, he started a poetry circle with young people he met in a traffic jam. Like many drivers of car service vehicles, he has an advanced degree. In European literature, from the University of Delhi. He is most interested in televised narratives. They had American programming, dubbed, on the satellite stations of the Punjab. The program he most admired concerned oil barons of Texas. This program was, of course, deeply indebted to the nineteenth-century novel, to the three-volume sagas. He believes Horatio Alger is shit, actually, though his work is to be studied as a foundation for the American television serial, which is a thing of beauty.
    The dispatcher sounds like the muezzin calling to the Muslims. Certain words are repeated.
Thirty-one, thirty-one, JFK, thirty-one, two twenty-eight, pickup, Seventh Avenue, two twenty-eight.
He fiddles with the volume on the radio so that it appears that he’s not listening to the telephone conversations in the backseat.
    “I had to break the chain on the door. Just give it a good shove. I just leaned into the door some, gave it a good shove, and the chain came right out of the wall. I’ll spackle it. Anyway, then I walked right up to the bathroom door and I said, ‘I know you haven’t fed the cat. I know you’re lying to me. I can tell when you’re lying to me. What do you think it’s like to be lied to constantly? Do you think that’s pleasant?’ That’s what I said. She gets outraged, like it’s an invasion. She’s yelling that she needs some time to herself and will I please go away. The thing is, it
smells
pretty awful. I can tell even from out in the hall that there’s some kind of emergency going on in there. I just say, ‘Fuck it, Ma, I’m coming in,’ and the guy on the television is yammering about concession speeches, and the cat is yowling about wanting to get fed, and I force the bathroom door, and that’s when I saw the
blood.
”
    One drive he particularly likes: to Coney Island. He has a story about the roller coaster named the Cyclone. His wife, to whom he was engaged to be married when aged sixteen, according to the wishes of their parents, is always worried about their son. She is unnecessarily worried; she follows him about, keeping his hands out of things, because he has to put his hands on everything to feel what it is like. If there is rice pudding dessert on the countertop, as there sometimes is, his son must put his hands in the rice pudding dessert. He likes the texture of rice pudding. If there is curry or a korma or a biryani on the table, his son will attempt to put his hands
in
or
on
the dinner, before eating it, even if it should burn him. When there is rain, his son proceeds first through the door and into the street with his hands aloft, as if he wishes to catch rain. His wife takes their son to the school for other children who attempt to catch rain, and this school,